In their fight to dominate Detroit’s cocaine trade a quarter — plus century ago, the lethal Best Friends gang not only terrorized their community but went to war against rival drug dealers, too.

Law enforcement officials said that the gang murdered as many as 80 people in the late eighties to early nineties, resulting in comparisons to Murder Inc., the legendary Prohibition — era mafioso death squad. In the chaos of the crack frenzy that gripped inner — city Detroit, the Best Friends were recognized as stone — cold killers who took what they wanted and murdered anyone who got in their way.

The crew — led by brothers Reginald “Rocking Reggie,” Terrance “Boogaloo,” Gregory “Ghost,” and Ezra “Wizard” Brown — started out as enforcers and contract killers. But it didn’t take long for them to flip the script and start knocking off the drug dealers they were protecting, thereby assuming control of their business operations and morphing into drug traffickers themselves. Nate “Boone” Craft, who confessed to 30 murders, was the Best Friends’ No. 1 head hitter and was as feared as he was deadly. Boone came up hard on the city’s east side, learning to fight and fend for himself at an early age, before embarking on a career as one of the black underworld’s elite hit men.

“Going from nine turning onto ten, me and my friends, we was more of fighters in the neighborhood,” Boone tells Penthouse. “Everybody knew us, and they knew that, well, if you messed with Little Boone he’s gonna come at you with something. He don’t come with his fists. He’s gonna come at you with a knife or a gun.”

Growing up on Continental between Jefferson and Freud, Boone met Charlie, the man that started him in his life of crime at a young age. A mentor of sorts, Charlie gave Boone packs of heroin to sell. Boone was happy with the two dollars he made off each pack, but he found that his true calling was in the enforcement field. Busting heads was just what Boone did naturally, and even at a young age, he wasn’t averse to doing the dirty work that others shied away from.

“At nine and ten we were small, but we was very rough,” Boone says menacingly. “Everybody knew it. They still even talk about it today. They’d say, ‘Yeah, man, I remember you back when you were a young dog.’ Yeah, okay, we were there — you want a lollipop? You knew me — that don’t mean that you truly ‘know’ me.”

Boone ended up locked down in a boys home as a teen, where it became a daily ritual to prove himself. Survival of the fittest was the M.O. in juvenile hall and Boone found himself in conflict with others from the jump. He was smaller than most of the boys, but that would soon change. In time Boone would become a giant of a man, and he used his years inside to learn what he could about criminality from any teen who could teach him something. He established a reputation as someone who wasn’t afraid to do what was needed, under any circumstances — a reputation he kept when he got out.

Boone says of the legend he gained, “‘He’s not scared of stabbing a person or shooting a person. He ain’t afraid. He never say anything after he do it. He tried to catch you by yourself, so there won’t be no witnesses.’ That’s the reputation I earned in the boys home.” He continues, “I don’t need nobody telling on me or watching me do it. Then they got something over my head to blackmail me. That’s what I learned inside.”

When Boone was released after five years, the drug game in the city of Detroit was on fire. It was the mid — eighties and the crack epidemic was raging in inner — city communities across the country. Trafficking organizations with colorful names like Young Boys Incorporated (YBI), Pony Down, the Chambers Brothers, and the Curry Brothers ruled the streets, and dealers like Maserati Rick, D. Holloway, White Boy Rick, and Big Ed moved weight. Flashy drug dealers, who cruised around the inner city — the epitome of hood royalty, pushing luxury vehicles like BMWs, Mercedes, and Maseratis — were the talk of the town. Rocking brand — name clothes, dimes on their arm, cash in their pockets, and armed to the teeth, they took capitalism and gave it an edge sharp as an obsidian knife.

“When I came home from prison, I had all that tension and anger in me, so I went and fought in a tough — man contest,” Boone remembers. “Boogaloo, Reg, and all them saw me fight. Maserati Rick came. After the fight, Reg said [he wanted] to talk some business. He told me there’s money to be made. He gave me five hundred. ‘Let’s talk privately, just me and you,’ Reg said. ‘If we gave you ten thousand more will you kill a motherfucker?’”

Boone was looking for a gig and didn’t have any qualms about whacking someone for money. If a person was in the drug business or criminal underworld, then they had it coming in Boone’s mind. Justifiable homicide. There was no honor among thieves in the crack era. It was a vicious landscape of betrayals, double crosses, and duplicity. “Snitches get stitches” was the street code, but other than that it was anything goes, and Best Friends were in the thick of the drama.

“I didn’t know Reg had so many enemies,” Boone says. “I told them to give me a hit list, let me know, and don’t worry about it. When you see that they done disappeared then you know I was on my job, but I don’t need you to be there watching me do it. I don’t even want anybody to ride with me.” Boone’s approach to taking contracts was similar to Jean Reno’s in The Professional. He was singular and focused. Clean and precise. But he discovered that his new partners were like gunslingers in the Old West. Best Friends took the Scarface mentality to heart.

“Scowling and brutish, Best Friends cut imposing figures, all standing at least six — foot — two and weighing over 230 pounds,” writes Scott Bernstein in his 2013 book The Detroit True Crime Chronicles. Bernstein goes on to point out that if “predecessors like YBI and Pony Down murdered in the name of profit and greed, the Best Friends did it for pure fun. They were burly and intimidating and took pleasure in hurting people.” The homicide detective put money on people’s heads, approved hit lists, arranged protection for dealers, AND made cases disappear.

Best Friends didn’t have a problem popping off in shopping centers, at a car wash, or in the middle of the street during the day. Boone tried to teach them a better way to resolve their beef, but old habits die hard. Boone knew death was always around the corner, and being that survival was his main objective, he knew it was only a matter of time before a bullet caught him in the head.

“Most of the time when I rode with them, I didn’t know if they were going to do anything or not. They’d pull up and everybody is jumping out. Them fools done took me on a shoot — out, what they called a drive — by, but these niggas don’t drive by, they jump out and chase the people,” Boone says. “Instead of shooting the fool from the car, they’ll jump out and run over there — blam, blam, blam, blam — they’d hit him or anybody else. That’s why I told ’em, ‘You all accidentally shooting people that ain’t got nothing to do with it, or you’re shooting people that you all shouldn’t be shooting at. The person that you want is that person. I can show you how to get that person without interfering with no one else. You get them from a distance or up close.’”

With Best Friends taking on all comers, knocking rival dealers off, robbing and killing their connects, and taking contracts on anyone, Detroit’s underworld became pure pandemonium. In the chaos, two of the Brown brothers, Ghost and Ezra, got murdered. With bullets flying from so many different directions, Best Friends didn’t know who was gunning for them, so they just put everybody in Detroit’s drug game on the hit list and Boone was happy to oblige. If somebody had money on their head, then Boone was coming for them. He was a straight contract killer, and money talked. “At first we all wanted money. Then it turned into power. They wanted to knock off all the other drug dealers so they could take over their territory. They wanted to knock off as many as they could,” Boone says. “But the word was out, and a bunch of rival dealers had a meeting about taking out Best Friends. That’s when they went after [Ghost and Ezra]. After that, we started going after the Curry Boys, White Boy Rick, and the Chambers Brothers. They started putting people on the list, talking about these are all the other people we need to knock off.”

DEA agent — turned — federal prosecutor E. James King said this of Best Friends: “If their goal was to take somebody out, they’d kill everybody and anybody around. Their reign of terror put the entire community — criminals and innocent people alike — in constant fear.” Despite Boone pushing for greater discipline, there were times when Best Friends would pull up in cars in broad daylight and let loose with an Uzi, bringing Grand Theft Auto — style mayhem to the Motor City. “Three days out of the week we’d go riding, spot people, follow them to where they’re going and try to find out what they do, how many times they do it, or where their house is at, where their safe house is, where they park their car, or where they lay their head,” Boone recalls. “Once we find out that info, then we’ll go there again and do basically the same thing. The third time, that’s their ass. They do it a third time, we’re at that spot waiting on them.”

With all the murders, Rocking Reg kept catching cases. He did his work out in the open and had complete confidence that Boone would take care of any witnesses that dared to take the stand against him. When Reg went to prison, Boogaloo was in charge. One time Boone and Boogaloo got into a dispute. Boone choked him and told him he’d cut him into little pieces in the bathtub and flush him down the toilet. But it never came to that. Boone talked to Reg, and out of respect for him, he let it lie.

There was a lot of money for everyone. Even though Rocking Reg was locked up, Best Friends was knee — deep in the drug game, making millions off cocaine. Boogaloo kept his circles small and his associates close. But with the feds closing in and his dislike for Boogaloo intensifying, Boone was making a plan to get out. He knew other drug barons like D. Holloway were scheming to make Best Friends obsolete.

“D. Holloway didn’t want no dealings with Best Friends even though he knew us,” Boone says. “But behind our backs, he talked about us and told Maserati Rick, ‘What the fuck you with those fools for, man? Those fools are gonna fuck around and try to take everybody down — they doing crazy shit.’” Best Friends eventually had Maserati Rick shot, and when he didn’t die, they paid a visit to his hospital room and finished the job. D. Holloway was eventually murdered while shopping at one of his favorite stores for designer socks. Gunned down in a public place in broad daylight — with $17,000 cash and a gun in his pockets. Some real old school Detroit shit. “We had the money — count machine sitting there in my house. Boogaloo brought a van, and we unloaded it all in my house while he was sitting there running the money through the machine. When he got to $1.6 mil he said, ‘Okay, bag it up.’ He got to meet up with the Colombian and get more shit. I was like, damn,” Boone says. “I want to know if I shoot all these niggas, would anybody miss ’em, cause money was power to me and I knew that they would do it to somebody else anyway. He bagged it up in duffle bags and bounced. I think after that, he got kind of nervous of me. I think he might have peeked a move on how I was looking at him.”

Despite his own scheming, Boone stayed above the fray and kept tabs on what was going on through law enforcement’s go — to guy for drug dealers, corrupt homicide detective Gil Hill. A major figure in Detroit’s criminal underworld as well as on the political front, Hill not only appeared in Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop movies, he also effectively called the shots in the city’s drug game — with a cadre of corrupt cops, and allegedly reporting straight to the mayor. “If you made our list, you was going to be killed. But Gil was like, ‘Nah, don’t mess with this one; I’m working a deal with him,’” says Boone. “I can’t ask no more questions, because that’s not my job. My job is only to do what they ask, if they’ve got the money. I would leave, but the other drug lords would tell everybody, ‘Hey, don’t mess with this person. Gil don’t want us to fuck with ’im. Gil got something up on him, or he’s gonna do a favor for Gil or Gil gonna do a favor for him, so he made the don’t — touch list.’”

The homicide detective put money on people’s heads, approved hit lists, arranged protection for dealers, made cases disappear, and got dealers to help set up rival dealers. Amazingly, even though Hill was a suspect in the FBI’s investigation, he didn’t go down in the early — nineties police — corruption probe in Detroit. He manipulated the criminal justice system to suit his own purposes. He was the real untouchable in Detroit’s underworld. “He would tell us to put a gun in somebody’s car — one of our enemies,” Boone says. “Then he’d have the police pull up on ’em and say, ‘Wait, is that a gun on your seat?’ ’Cause the people don’t know we just sneaked a gun in their car. Same way we did with drugs. He used to tell us to set people up with drugs. We’d go put some drugs in the motherfucker’s car. We’d go throw half a brick in there or something, then we’d tell the cops.”

If somebody had money on their head, then Boone was coming for them. He was a straight contract killer, and money talked.

But eventually, the jig was up. The empire the Brown brothers created was floundering. Ghost and Wizard were dead. Rocking Reg was serving life in prison for allegedly murdering one of White Boy Rick’s partners. Boogaloo was on the run, a fugitive from justice. Boone knew his number was up. It was all coming back on Best Friends, and karma is always a bitch. No doubt it would have ended badly for Boone if not for something he learned around this time: that Boogaloo had been involved with his little brother getting killed.

“If somebody killed one of your family members, you are going to try to go at them or you’re going to tell the law,” Boone explains. “Unless you just don’t give a damn about your family being killed. Some people will do that, but I couldn’t. I already knew that Boogaloo was behind the killing of my little brother. I couldn’t get to him, so I went to the DEA and told them, ‘I can help you get this motherfucker. I figure if we get him we send him to prison, and my friends in there are gonna butcher his ass,’ and they said that they would like to get him in there anyway, ’cause he had a contract on his ass in prison.”
In Boone’s mind, cutting a deal with the feds was justified because he wanted Boogaloo dead. Meanwhile, Boogaloo realized Boone was a loose end that needed some fast mending and put out a hit on him. Boone got shot, but survived.

“To give up Boogaloo and Best Friends, the feds gave me immunity across the table for any of my own crimes. I admitted that I was involved with 30 murders,” Boone says. “They said, ‘Okay, but we’re just going to find you guilty for these two, but you have to tell us who they was, where you did them, who all helped you.’ I gave them the detail on all that. The judge asked, ‘Can’t you find somebody else to make the deal with?’ But the papers were signed and they knew I was the only one who was willing to give them Best Friends. I gave them up. They killed my little brother and then they tried to kill me.”

Understandably, the immunity deal caused some heads to shake. Says Boone: “Everybody was like, ‘How the hell can they do that?’ But they wanted Boogaloo more than me. They wanted these people that I was gonna give them more than me and they figured they’d get them to flip on somebody even bigger. That’s what they were planning on doing. Try to eat up the chain. I was just giving them these people, that’s all. The rest of the people I know about I wouldn’t have given them up. They didn’t have nothing to do with me going to prison or me getting shot up or killing my little brother, so I kept my mouth shut.” The feds wouldn’t get Boogaloo, though. He was killed by one of his own guys. A longtime crew member murdered Boogaloo and stole the buy money for a 100 — kilo load of cocaine. The remaining Best Friends were tracked down and charged for that murder, too. Boone didn’t have to testify against anyone. He was shipped off to do his time in the Witness Security Program, a secret program in the Federal Bureau of Prisons where high — profile witnesses can do their time safely. “The state gave me twelve to twenty. The feds gave me seventeen.” Boone says. “The state and the feds came up with an agreement that they’ll run the sentences together. I wouldn’t do no more than twelve — and — a — half years.”

In 2008, Boone was released from prison and moved back to his old Detroit neighborhood, where he still resides today. Unafraid of anyone connected to Best Friends or Detroit’s police force, Boone moves around the East Side freely. “We was young fools then,” the imposing six — foot — three, 300 — pounder says. “I wish I could turn back the hands of time and just stay straight and start a small business. When you become a gangster or hit man, you get shot up. You get tore up. There is no such thing as retirement. Prison, death, or getting crippled is your future. I’ve been to prison. I’m crippled. I can’t even move my hands. Leg tore up. I have to walk with a cane. Shotgun blast. They hit me with everything, nine in the back, but yet this is me. I’m free.”

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES: BLOOMBERG; ROLLS PRESS/POPPERFOTO